Katrin Althans studied English Literature and Language, German Literature and Language as well as Communication Studies at the University of Münster, Germany. She received her Master’s degree in 2005 and also holds a German Law degree (Erstes Staatsexamen).
In 2010, Katrin published her dissertation Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Literature and Film and received her PhD from the University of Bonn, Germany. After having worked as a teaching and research fellow at the Universities of Münster and Düsseldorf, she worked as lecturer in postcolonial studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) and as lecturer in Australian studies at the University of Cologne (Germany). After a second maternity leave, she worked as a teaching and research fellow at the University of Düsseldorf from October 2016 to September 2018, a position funded by the Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer and the Equal Opportunities Officer. From October 2018, Katrin has been researching her PostDoc project “Stories of Refugees and the Narrative Authority of the Law” as a visiting scholar at the Postcolonial Studies Department at the University of Duisburg Essen (UDE). Funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), she is currently a research fellow at UDE to write her second book on “Narratives of Flight and Migration in Literature and Law.”
Her research focuses on postcolonial anglophone and transcultural studies as well as British literary and cultural studies, and she is particularly interested in the fields of law & literature, Australian and Indigenous studies, Gothic and Crime Fiction Studies, and literary and cultural theories such as spatial theories, theories of migration, ecocriticism, and geocriticism as well as gender, translation, film, and game studies. Although she focuses on contemporary literature, she also has a keen interest in the 19th and 18th centuries. Katrin is a board member of GASt and regularly participates in GAPS and IGA events.
Furthermore, she also has experience as a freelance teacher and translator, mainly in law and the energy sector.
